THE PLAUSIBILITY PROBLEM

'If prohibitions against same-sex relationships on the basis of biblical injunctions are to be sustained as part of Christian discipleship and are not to be viewed warily as the inscrutable commands of a distant deity, some effort has to be made to show what human good they serve. Why is this the way of love? What glimpses of human fulfillment does it point to? If perhaps it is for some wider good of society for which I as an individual may have to sacrifice myself, what is that wider good, and why does it demand this sacrifice? If it is for my good, what good might that be, or is it simply the satisfaction of knowing that I have lives in accordance with God's standards? And what purposes of the God of love might be behind God's standards? Even if it is dangerous to use the love command to short-circuit the detailed task of moral discernment, love is the sum of the law, and it does lay on us that constraint to begin to indicate what kind of human good is waited on by prohibiting same-sex relationships.' 

Robert Song, Covenant and Calling, p.78. 

LOVE VS. LAW

'Love is constantly in danger not of fulfilling the law, but of forgetting it; while the law frequently constrains our desires, it does so precisely because it maps out the shape of our love.'

Robert Song, Covenant and Calling, p.78. 

CELIBACY

'...if we in the contemporary Church have a need now, one might say that it is to recover the significance of authentic celibacy. Against the heritage of Protestant ideals of the family, against post- and sub-Freudian assumptions about the necessity of a healthy sex life for psychological wholeness, against the late modern capitalist consumerization of sexuality, a renewed understanding of the theological significance of celibacy and vowed singleness is surely essential to the Church's truthful witness.' 

Robert Song, Covenant and Calling, p.22.

PARENTING

'The miracle of procreation is a reflection of the miracle of creation, a participation by created beings, in a way appropriate to created beings, in the original gift of creation itself.'

Robert Song, Covenant and Calling: Towards a Theology of Same-Sex Relationships, p.13.